The advent and growth of the World Wide Web and networking software enable private individuals and business personnel to access information from an increasing number of sources, such as web servers, database servers, enterprise systems, and other forms of information storage systems. The information provides data for certain business processes. Accordingly, businesses rely on systems and techniques that ensure the correct data is generated and displayed as content on a user's computer display device.
To ensure the consistency of displayed information, businesses continue to harness various technologies associated with distributed systems to develop and provide specialized services. One type of technology that is gaining popularity are web services designed for business processes. A business web service is system functionality that is accessible over the Internet, an Intranet, and even an Extranet, using standard web-based protocols (e.g., Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP)). Such services may provide content that is configured and published using description languages, such as Hyper Text Transfer Markup Language (HTML) and eXtensible Markup Language (XML) interfaces and messages. Accordingly, business process services are an ideal way for businesses to provide services in heterogeneous environments where a consumer of these services may be a user operating a desktop, an application program, or even another business process hosted on any number of different platforms.
Although service technologies allow businesses to publish and retrieve information through a network, the information has to be natively managed or temporarily transformed into XML. Further, documents may be created through references to smaller chunks of data. For example, during the creation of XML-based documents, a user may use entity references or Xinclude statements to reference other content when creating a content conglomerate (i.e., a document that is constructed of smaller referenced content). One problem for the user who is editing or authoring a content conglomerate is that the references to other content do not reveal or identify the content associated with the references in a format ascertainable to a user. Accordingly, there is a need for a solution to the assembly-based approach to content management lifecycles (i.e., a decontextualized approach to editing and authoring content-based documents).